Patents are becoming more and more important to a business's success, especially in today's global economy. Patents can be viewed as a new type of currency in this global economy because they grant the holder a right to exclude others from making, using, or selling the patented technology. Patents are further valuable because they collectively represent a vast technological database. Much of this database is only available as issued patents (e.g., it is not released in any other form). According to Larry Kahaner's book, Competitive Intelligence, Simon & Schuster, 1996, “More than 75 percent of the information contained in U.S. patents is never released anywhere else.” Of course, not all patents are as valuable to the patent owner or patent licensees as others. Some owned or licensed patents provide little or no value to the corporate entity. These patents become a drain on corporate resources, for example, in obtaining the patents, paying maintenance fees, and paying license fees.
A number of patent searching tools are available, such as the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Automated Patent System (APS), and the on-line search services offered by Lexis and Westlaw. Other providers of patent information and patent search tools include Derwent, MicroPatent, Questel, Corporate Intelligence, STN, IFI/Plenum, The Shadow Patent Office (EDS), IBM, and CAS. These tools are not analysis tools, but rather search tools. These tools enable a user to identify patents that satisfy a specified keyword or other search criterion. However, these tools have limited, if any, automated functions to aid a user in analyzing the patents for the purpose of making tactical and strategic business decisions based on the patents, whether the company's own patents or those of competitors.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,991,751 issued on Nov. 23, 1999 by Rivette, et al., entitled, “System, method, and computer program product for patent-centric and group-oriented data processing” discloses a system for evaluating the value of the corporation's patent portfolio. To fully analyze the value and applicability of the corporation's patent portfolio, the user must take into account other information, such as R&D information, financial information, manufacturing information, and licensing information, for both the corporation and its competitors. The '751 patent is an example of a prior art system that processes patent information as an analysis tool. Such analysis is used to better manage patent portfolios by referencing non-patent information to make a decision. However, the '751 patent does not consider the portfolio management of non-patent information by referencing patent information to make a decision.
The sheer number of patents and the number of companies applying for them make it difficult to filter out which companies may hold a competitive advantage in their respective markets. Financial fundamentals alone do not allow a user to determine if a particular company is poised for long term growth. In today's fast paced world of market penetration and dominance, intellectual property is playing a more important role in the survival of any company. Patents can add a 50% premium to a company's valuation, especially when the patents a company holds are first announced. There are systems that take advantage of Internet technology to aid in this process. In these systems, a person wishing to screen financial securities and relevant intellectual property information first requires a user to find an online financial stock screening tool, define filtering criteria and wait for the result set to be returned to the user. As a second step, if a user wishes to now evaluate the patents that these companies may possess, a second search is required by accessing a web site to search patents. This is a very cumbersome process.
In most of these prior systems, the user is able to select a category of stocks based on financial selection preferences. That is, a stock that is currently trading between $2 and $10 with a price to earnings ratio less than 10, whereas a user seeking to find patents on a particular company would first go to a patent information website, define search criteria and then get a result set of patents of all companies based on the users search criteria. The user would then select the companies of interest and go to a financial website and select a screening tool.
In general, these prior art systems remain as stand alone non-integrated systems. Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a system which helps investors screen out investment opportunities by combining fundamental financial search criteria with that of patent search criteria such as intellectual property holdings, patents issued and the like.